Two boys squatted on the sidewalk in a quite street in downtown Jakarta. I peered curiously through my father’s car windows as my father struggled to find the correct address.
We were lost. Or so we thought.
But the activity of these two boys had diverted my attention. The two boys, maybe 15-16 years of age, were dressed in scruffy clothes that hung on a malnourished frame, in dire need for vitamins and minerals. Not an extraordinary sight to see in Indonesia, a country rich in natural resources with its leaders amongst the richest in the World, but hundreds if not thousands of its people die each day, hunger-stricken.
As my father carefully read the map, I continued to watch the two boys. Upon careful examination, these two boys were different from typical
Indonesian street children. They had piercing on their blemished dark brown face, tattooed arms, and different colored wrist rubber bands. One of the boys had his hair stand on its end, colored in shades of blue, yellow, green and red, somewhat to imitate the punk culture of the West. The other boy was having his hair dyed right there, on the sidewalk much to my amazement.
I can guarantee that they have never set foot on ‘Western’ soil. Nor can they speak or understand English.
And yet their appearance shows how they much they want to imitate the Western culture.
Driving past the slums in Jakartan streets, my heart aches in sorrow as I tried to ignore the foul smell from the open sewer, honking and screeching cars that makes my ear drums want to explode, and yelling street vendors with their offer of the best bargains.
Zink-roofed shacks stood, densely stacked like cans of sardines on a supermarket shelf. Children ran around in barefoot sometimes half naked showing their skinny bodies that consists of bones wrapped in skin and 0.01 inches of fat.
Driving past the more ‘elite’ part of the city, I realized that these people are not much different from those on the streets in Montreal or London, much to my surprise. They too wore ‘branded’ clothes and Levi’s jeans, which are obviously fake costing less than one-tenth of the original brand. Colored rubber bands dangled on their dark brown wrists, even though they may not know what it signifies. Young girls walk around it tight fitting low-cut jeans and t-shirts that is so short it looks like as if the dressmaker had measured half a meter short of the material.
But where is our Eastern culture? The memories of my hometown that is etched to my mind was of women dressed in kebayas ( traditional costumes ), or in more casual clothes like t-shirts and baggy jeans which does not trespass our Eastern culture, known for its modesty and politeness.
Living most of my life overseas has made me a stranger of my own culture and country.
But I can assure you that it is not my culture. So how have these people been affected by the West?
Stopping by a small warung (a grocery shop) to quench my thirst as my throat was already as dry as the dust that surrounds me, I found my answer.
A 32 inch TV screen featuring bikini clad blue-eyed and blonde haired women, laughing and talking in English filled the tiny warung. Passerby stared at the screen, their beady eyes almost popping out of its place.
It was Baywatch TV series.
But this is Indonesia, the biggest Moslem nation in the world. How come such ‘pornographic’ programs are playing at children’s viewing times?
Not surprisingly, an article on the Jakarta post confirmed that Indonesia is the third worst in pornography after Scandinavia and Russia.
Shocked, I walked away. Now I understood how the people in my country, even in the rural parts, are influenced by the Western culture.
Loubna Skalli in her chapter on Loving Muslim Women With Vengeance : The West, Women, and Fundamentalism in Joe Kincheloe’s Miseducation of the West book, writes how fundamentalist Moslems youth are in revolt against the unequal distribution of wealth and resources within and amongst nations, against their own socioeconomic and political exclusions, as well as the widening circle of disenfranchised classes from which they originate. These youth are in revolt against their lack of power to resist the forces that threaten their religious and cultural identity.
But no doubt, these forces are almost impossible to resist as it is embedded in the more globalized popular culture; in the form of music, film and videogames.
Shirley Steinberg writes in her chapter on Dessert Minstrels: Hollywood’s Curriculum of Arabs and Muslims in Miseducation of the West, the pedagogy of popular culture is ideological and is capable in influencing the production of identities and experience. Although she stresses on how popular culture has helped articulate feelings of discontent amongst Westerners towards Moslems, I would add that this has an affect on Moslems too.
Moslems are made to feel inferior to their own beliefs and identity. And they are made to be ignorant of the importance of own their religious and cultural identity for the sake of being ‘in’ the latest trends and fashion.
The pedagogy of popular culture is not to be undermined as it is a form of colonization of the mind.
In the words of Ashis Nandy in her piece entitled Colonization of the`Mind in The Post Development Reader, this colonialism colonizes minds in addition to bodies and it release forces within the colonized societies to alter their cultural priorities once and for all. In the process it helps generalize the concept of modern West from a geographical and temporal entity to a psychological category. The West is now everywhere, within the West and outside; in structures and in minds.
It is by this notion that has resulted in the pejorative word ‘Westernization’. And it is because of this form of colonization an increasing number of Moslems are returning to the fundamental teachings of Islam.
But reflecting this on myself, I do admit that I have been ‘colonized’ in a way. Being the fashionista that I am, I love to dress in whatever clothing that suits my taste. Be it a ‘Western’ or Eastern fashion.
Nonetheless, my writings have always been critiques of the West and its ideologies.
So don’t judge a book by its cover.
